The Story of the Fly by Jason Drew & Justine Joseph

Author:Jason Drew & Justine Joseph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Environment, Sustainable development, Sustainability, Eco-business, Entrepreneur, Green business, Saving the planet, World Hunger, Saving the world, Future, Insects, Protein, Waste, The Fly, Green, Environmentally friendly, Agriprotein, Maggots, Survival
ISBN: 9780992175412
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Flies can change direction by 90° in less than the blink of an eye - actually in eight wing strokes or 30 to 50 milliseconds, which is literally faster than a human eye could ever hope to open, shut and open again.

‘By carefully measuring the animal’s flight path in Fly-O-Rama, we can reconstruct the visual world from the fly’s perspective,’ says Dickinson, ‘the equivalent of sitting on the back of the fly as it zips around the arena.’

The result? In addition to motion sickness, this fake fly rodeo ride has given the researchers an idea of what causes the buck and shift through each 90° saccade - namely an ‘expansion of the fly’s visual world’, says Dickinson. ‘These saccades are collision-avoidance reflexes that keep the animal from crashing into objects.’ Thank you Fly-O-Rama. We may not have needed you to tell us that a fruit fly will change direction to dodge a crash. But it does help to understand how sophisticated this insect’s aerosensory system really is. Which means it’s time to look a little deeper into their eyes.

The Sci-Fi Of How Flies See

‘If you take a fly on a date to the movies it will think you brought it to a slide show,’ says Dickinson. He explains that, although fruit flies aren’t so sharp when it comes to image-forming and spatial resolution - at just 25 x 25 pixels per eye, they lag pitifully behind the 1000 x 1000 pixels of a cheap digital camera - their temporal resolution allows them to resolve flashing lights up to 10 times faster than we can.

So, in addition to making them bad movie dates, fly eyes also help to make the insects masters of flight. This is why about two-thirds of the fly brain is reserved for processing what their overactive eyes can see. But that’s still not enough information. When you’re trying to get a full view of how the creature named after its greatest skill performs, you need more pictures of more parts of the process. Which probably means you need some more machines.

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